Óscar Collazos (Bahía Solano, Colombia, 1942), novelist and essayist. Between 1969 and 1970 he was director at the Centre for Literary Research at the Casa de las Americas in Havana. Later, he lived in Barcelona for eighteen years, where he published a major part of his literary work. He has also lived in Paris, Stockholm and Berlin. He currently lives in Cartagena de Indias, and is a renowned columnist on the newspaper El Tiempo. His work has been translated into French, German and Italian, and his young adults' novel 'La ballena varada' (Siruela, 2000) has sold more than 150,000 copies.